Content:
Sketch of the Academic Building, in the Georgia School of Technology Announcement ca. 1888. The sketch
appears before a section titled, "Georgia School of Technology: Organization."

History:
The Academic Building, completed in 1888, was designed by the prestigious Atlanta architectural firm, Bruce
and Morgan and constructed by contractor Angus McGilvray, for a total cost of $43,250 in state funds. The
Academic Building was one of two buildings comprising the Georgia Tech campus in October 1888 when the
Georgia School of Technology first opened its doors. The Academic Building was considered "the major
academic building of early Georgia Tech" and was used for both teaching and administration until 1959, when
it became exclusively an administration building. The Academic Building, like the Shop Building was
designed in "High Victorian" style according to the principles of Ruskin. They were built of Chattahoochee
brick, machine pressed brick, and Georgia marble and granite and thus serve as monuments to the "fledgling
industrial South." According to Warren Drury, in his 1984 M.A. Thesis, "The Architectural History of
Georgia Tech," the two buildings "personify in masonry the educational concepts which informed the very
establishment of Georgia Tech, a division of hand and brain which envisioned as of equal importance, the
intellectual and practical pursuits of an educated person." The towers on each building symbolize the two
parts of the educated man. Drury further states that "the justaposition of art and technics can be seen in
the [Academic] Building, which contrasts molded brick ornament with smooth human-made brick and the rugged
artisian granite column capital in the center of the porch with the smooth, shiny machine-finished marble
column." The building is described in the Georgia School of Technology Announcements of that time as: "a
splendid edifice of brick, trimmed with granite and terra cotta, slate roof. It has one hundred and
thirty feet front, is one hundred and twenty deep and is four stories high above basement story. It
contains ample accomodations in halls, offices, apparatus rooms, recitation and lecture rooms, free hand
and mechanical drawing rooms, library and chapel."